The Good Teacher

by Richard Anderson

  ‘Abi! So lovely to see you!’

  ‘Jennifer! So great to see you!’

  They kissed and Jennifer directed her to the car, asking about her children and the train trip and what she had been up to. Jennifer half-listened, noting that Abi’s eyes were still crystal blue and her skin smooth and unmarked. She was carrying a bit of weight, that was obvious, but she had to concede the overall package was still pretty good. Her competitive nature was a little displeased but the strategist inside knew it was a good thing. Andy’s defences would be weakened by the power of the physical. When Abi rang, Jennifer had been genuinely gobsmacked that she’d accepted the invitation to stay. She had thought the breakdown of the marriage and the needy friendship with Andy created a window of opportunity, but the day after she’d typed the words she realised it was such a long shot that it wasn’t worth hoping for. But here she was, happy and confident as you like. An invitation to stay was just what she had been waiting for.

  In the car on the way home they chatted easily. Abi didn’t talk much about her separation from Tim, but Jennifer could tell it had been painful and disappointing. Jennifer understood. No one wanted marriage breakdown. No one sought it out, but sometimes it just couldn’t be helped. She gave Abi the best version of Madison she could: that she’d studied hard all year despite changing schools because she’d been unhappy (not mentioning that it had been the school that had been unhappy).

  Jennifer didn’t have any particular plans for Abi. There would be a cup of tea when they got home, more chat, then a chance for Abi to shower and freshen up, then drinks and dinner. On Saturday they would have breakfast together and then Jennifer expected Andy might take Abi on a farm tour. She would give them enough rope to get themselves in trouble.

  They had barely got in the front door when Andy arrived, pushing his way through the gauze back door, removing his hat. Jennifer hadn’t expected him to be quite so prompt. He was never in the house at this hour of day unless there was some sort of disaster. Abi turned to the sound of the door, perhaps not having heard him come up the path. When they saw each other, he pulling his hat to his chest, she swivelling unaware, the impact of meeting in flesh and blood was so powerful that Jennifer felt immediately embarrassed to witness it. And then she felt the unexpected: jealousy. It was childish jealousy—over something she no longer wanted but wasn’t happy to let someone else have. For them to display such a magnetic connection seemed somehow rude and immodest. A part of her brain wanted to quip that they should ‘get a room’ and another part wanted to whack them with the nearby broom. But in the time it took to think and feel these things the moment had evanesced and Andy was coughing and banging his chest, saying: ‘Hello Abi. How are you? So nice to see you.’

  He looked like he meant it as he leant to kiss her, barely giving her time to say how good it was to see him. Jennifer wanted to step in between them but instead told Andy what Abi had said in the car: ‘Abi is enjoying the pleasure of being a single woman.’

  Abi and Andy both looked at her as if she’d just beamed into the room from another galaxy.

  ‘It’s nice to have everything out in the open, I always think,’ Jennifer said. ‘So how about a cup of tea?’

  Abi nodded an uncertain ‘Yes please’, and Andy said he’d put the kettle on. Jennifer reassured him that it was her job, but first she would show Abi her room.

  Beside a large bed with a bright blue designer bedspread, Abi said: ‘Is everything all right, Jennifer?’

  Jennifer might have said many things, but her choice was to sigh heavily and say quietly: ‘It’s been very tough lately—’ a just-withheld sob, ‘between Andy and me.’

  Abi put out a hand and said: ‘I understand. God knows I do.’

  Jennifer sensed she had blundered over a line. If she drew too much sympathy from Abi, Abi might take her side and distance herself from Andy, and Jennifer certainly didn’t want that. She stepped away from the hand and brushed herself down. ‘But we’re all adults here, aren’t we?’

  Abi smiled that treacly smile at her. ‘I hope so.’

  ABI

  So here she was, in the house of the man who might be the love of her life, having had one of the most powerful romantic experiences of her existence, in the cloak of a schemer. The extraordinary, heart-shaking, potentially life-changing moment was slightly sabotaged by the fear that her hoped-for love might not want to have anything to do with a deceiver. But the wife she was undermining was a worse deceiver and schemer than anyone Abi had ever met. This didn’t justify what Abi wanted to do, but it did make her feel a little better.

  She was not going to walk away from the feeling she’d had when Andy walked into the room. In a few seconds all her questions had been answered, even those she dared not ask herself. The one that remained was whether he would want to follow up on it too. She might have fantasised about a relationship, but was never soft-headed enough to think it a real possibility. No one travelled to a married couple’s home expecting to run away with the husband. Not even a lonely, single, middle-aged online dreamer.

  But now was different. Andy had shown how much she meant to him too. She wanted him more than she had ever wanted any man. If he took her for a ride alone in his ute, she knew she would not be able to control herself. The idea of going back out there to have a cup of tea with him was enough to blow the top off her head but there was no way round it.

  The best approach was to be as cool as possible: respond to Andy in the polite minimum; not look at him, and certainly not touch him. If anything was going to happen it would take time, perhaps lots of time. So now she would pretend she had come as Jennifer’s friend and Jennifer sounded like she could do with some support.

  In the bathroom, she went through practical routines to get control of herself and thought about tea, a stroll in the garden, probably, and then a drink and dinner. The afternoon and night seemed endless in its challenges and heart-throbbing thrills.

  The bathroom was without blemish, with the bright whiteness of recent renovation and thorough, fastidious cleaning. There were clean, decor-matching hand towels and fluffy expensive bath towels. Abi suddenly felt the power of the woman. The dinner would no doubt be sublime, probably a recipe influenced by the latest city trends. The garden walk would be something to dread—the glimpse she’d had was of plucked, cultured beauty. And Jennifer’s figure was ageless. It had the kind of upward-lifting firmness that could make you weep quietly in your shaping underwear. Nevertheless, there was no softness about her. Men liked a bit of softness, didn’t they? This was Abi’s weapon. When the opportunity arose she would go soft and feminine. She would also go hard.

  Madison was at dinner, a fearless-looking girl, with the steam of an imminent volcano, whose answers to Abi’s questions were short and direct. Jennifer gave her a look and Madison returned it with attitude. It all made sense. The girl had seen all the conversations—had written I just can’t do this anymore on behalf of her father—and knew Abi was a threat. Presumably, she’d also read the ‘A’ and ‘B’ hypothesis and felt like her family was about to fall apart. But it was a pleasant dinner anyway. Andy told old stories and Jennifer humoured him. None of their cracks showed.

  In bed, Abi fantasised about Andy sneaking down the hallway to her room like he might have done for girls at different times many years ago.

  After a breakfast that had everything, she went on the farm tour with Andy: the tour she had imagined and reformulated and dreamt about so many times over the months. They chatted happily as he showed her the farm’s progress and expressed his love for the landscape where he lived. And then she couldn’t take it anymore.

  When she got in from shutting a gate, she turned in her seat, leant across, put a hand on his hand and said: ‘I can’t block out what I’m feeling. I need to see if you feel it or at least how much you feel it.’

  Then they were kissing hard, messily, like B-grade movie actors, the space too small, the gear stick and the steering wheel keen to be involved, the
rearview mirror in serious jeopardy.

  When they had completed their mad coupling and reorganised their clothes, they sat upright in their seats, looking straight ahead through the windscreen at a flat, black paddock populated only by thin grey stalks of stubble. They might have been chaste daters in a 1950s movie.

  He said without cue: ‘I love you.’

  She looked at him and smiled as if he’d said something banal. ‘And I love you, Andy. I probably have for a while, I just needed to make sure.’ She swallowed visibly. ‘But what I want to know is what it means. Does it end here? You’re the married one. All you have to say is that it can go no further, and I’ll get on that train and you won’t hear from me again.’

  ‘Abi, I’ve breached all my morals and the rules I live by, compromised everything, betrayed my wife and daughter and potentially destroyed my farm, my inheritance, my business and everything I’ve worked for.’ And now he took the deepest breath. ‘But I knew what I was doing.’ He forced himself to look across at her, afraid he might have scared her off. ‘You can’t leave me now.’

  Her face was radiant. She grabbed him and kissed him again.

  But of course, that’s not what happened. Wasn’t ever going to happen. There was nothing radiant or messy or hard and never would be. It was just another colourful daydream, a figment of her prime-time imagination.

  When she had got back into the ute from doing that gate, she had put her hand on his, but that’s where it had stayed. Nobody had grappled with anyone. No clothes needed rearranging.

  In real life he gripped her hand, hard, as he drove, shaking his head just a little. Eventually he said: ‘God, we’re a pair, aren’t we?’

  She nodded, waiting for him to lunge, expecting the moral tethers to snake out the window like freed ribbons. But they stayed fast.

  Abi thought about asking how ‘A’ and ‘B’ were getting on. If Jennifer had been unfaithful, then why couldn’t Andy? But when she felt his hand squeeze hers she knew that it was one of the reasons she liked him so much: he was steadfast. She imagined him as the most loyal of friends, the sort of good man you could rely on. Had she honestly thought he would react any other way? She thought she had got her fantasy life under control, but now it seemed there was more work to do. All she could get out was a short breathy: ‘Oh fuck.’

  Andy didn’t say another thing until they were back at the house. He dropped her off to pull couch grass from endless garden beds with her nemesis, departing with something excruciating like: ‘I’ll leave you girls together.’

  ANDY

  He had taken the ute to do a check on the lateral move irrigators and let the women walk the garden without him. There were things that needed to be done before the end of the day, at least that’s what he claimed, and afternoon tea had been a trial enough. What was a man supposed to do when he came in from a workday to meet up with someone who had been some sort of long-distance soulmate, feeling hesitant, reluctant, pessimistic, only to find that the woman who had been text on a screen represented by an outdated photo turned out to have a physical attraction that was overpowering? The symptoms were like those of a heart attack: his chest tightening, his arms cramping. He had to rely on a lifetime of learned discipline to prevent himself standing lost and moonstruck at his own back door. When he saw Abi, he saw only the best things: the bluest eyes, an echo of girlish awkwardness, the warmth, the shiny, positive nature. Was it possible that in that moment he had forgotten he was married? Had he moved into some dream state where he was twenty-three, single and able to choose who he wished? It was as if he couldn’t trust himself. Parts of him were moving to their own agendas regardless of thought or command. Thankfully whatever it was hadn’t lasted, and of course Jennifer was there to bring him back, almost gloating over Abi’s divorced status.

  He wondered what Abi felt. Over tea and slice she had been indifferent, even a bit cold, but there was no denying what had happened between them. Andy guessed that after such an encounter, like the good person she was, Abi had decided to pull back and not encourage anything between them.

  But he found himself desperate to be around her. Even now as she walked the garden with his wife, he was trying to find an excuse to go back and be alongside her. Was there a tap he needed to fix? A bag of fertiliser he needed to drop off?

  That night, lying next to Jennifer in the dark, unable to sleep, he told himself his feelings for Abi were just a middle-aged flash in the pan. If a friend had told him the same story he would have laughed at it as weakness and short-term delusion. How often did men lose their way like that? To young women, but not always. Usually to someone inappropriate though: a neighbour, a mate’s wife, someone they worked with. You knew they thought it was different for them, that they weren’t making the mistake the other fools did. It was special. It was love. He never expected it could be him. And it so was.

  But it was simply not in him to sacrifice his marriage and his daughter’s feelings and his farm for these desires. Was it cowardice? Jennifer had not baulked at her opportunity. Whatever you said about Jennifer you couldn’t say she was a baulker. She was a bull at a gate. Unrivalled. He could see her again, riding that principal like all men wished their women would, with desire that blotted out all other things: responsibility, time, duty, expectation, rules. It aroused him and broke his heart in one awful surge.

  He got out of bed, careful not to wake Jennifer, and made his way to the kitchen. There’d been plenty of nights over the years when he couldn’t sleep—because of debt or failure or drought or flood, or the gamble of what he did, when the pain of stress in his guts wouldn’t allow him to rest. He took a long drink of water. This was just another time. He would not fold now either.

  It was Jennifer who suggested the farm tour for Abi. Andy wondered if he was the only one who felt the heaviness of the pause as Jennifer waited before saying: ‘I’ve got few things to do around here, so, if it’s okay, Andy will take you and I’ll stay behind.’

  Abi’s response was positive, polite and gave nothing away. It was possible she would have preferred to have Jennifer along.

  Andy gripped his chair to stop himself leaping into the air but was quickly on his feet, slurping down hot tea and rubbing his hands together, asking: ‘Are you right to get going?’

  ‘I’d better clean my teeth and I’ll be with you.’

  She made the ute smell better, be a better place, as he drove explaining all the things he had achieved on the farm and the many plans he had. She seemed genuinely interested and asked questions that were appropriate and astute. When he moved to get out and do the gates she insisted she do them and did so laughing at herself, waving him through when she’d worked out the catch. He would have liked to pull her in close to him, to kiss her, even though he’d probably forgotten how. So they kept driving, maybe for hours, and he could have kept going all day, all year. He knew he would remember the day in every detail and that would have to be his consolation.

  There was one moment, when she put her hand over his and he thought she might ask for something he couldn’t deliver. But she didn’t say or do anything, just kept very quiet and a little remote as they bounced through the paddocks. He gave her hand a little squeeze in a sort of recognition of their predicament. Then she said something like ‘Oh fuck’, and he thought she had got it just right.

  That night they had a Sunday dinner ‘graze’, as Jennifer liked to call it: fruits, cheese, a frittata, cold meats, white wine. Madison appeared to have given up on her mood. She asked Abi questions about her life and how she knew her parents and generally made pleasant conversation. They watched some reality TV, laughing and poking fun at the contestants together. It was a good night and Andy’s fear of indiscretion ebbed.

  He put Abi on the train on Monday morning with strict instructions from Jennifer to be back for the school meeting at ten.

  They were both quiet in the car and he wondered if she was feeling what he was feeling or if it was just an unhinged moment of his own. He asked
again about her children and it gave them a nice safe place to go. They talked about Kate, Lee and Madison until the first houses of the town made them think about the end of a journey and the finality of a weekend.

  On the platform, when the train was blowing its horn in approach, he leant to pick up her bag. She pushed his hand away, saying sweetly: ‘I think I can handle it.’ And smiled at him. He let her and she stepped forward, a gesture that she was already gone. He wanted to say something, something she might remember, something to signify the link between them, but her own words cut into the time left: ‘Thanks for asking me to come. It was so nice to get out of the city.’ She kissed him lightly on the cheek and climbed into the doorway of the carriage, turned, gave a little wave and then the train was gone.

  He stood on the platform feeling the loss of something, the same flat, lonely feeling he always had when he put someone on a country train in an empty station. But he was pleased too because the temptation had gone. He had not buckled to his desire and his life was intact.

  But, driving home, listening to the radio, thinking about not much, her last words came to him. Asking me to come? Nice to get out of the city?